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By Nashville Indiana Title Company
The Paper You Need Before We Can Even Start Your Deed You found the cabin. The one off a gravel road past Bean Blossom, with the ridge behind it and the...
You found the cabin. The one off a gravel road past Bean Blossom, with the ridge behind it and the porch that faces west. Offer accepted, financing lined up, closing date circled on the calendar. Then we call and ask for the legal description, and there's a pause on the line, because the seller has a tax bill, a mailing address, and a handshake memory of where the property line runs, but nobody's quite sure where the actual document lives.
That document is where your deed begins. Before we can draft anything, we need the prior recorded deed... the one that shows how the seller came to own the property in the first place. Everything we prepare flows from it.
A deed we prepare for your closing has to describe the exact same piece of land the seller currently holds. Not roughly the same. Exactly. The legal description on your new deed gets copied forward from the last recorded one, word for word, metes and bounds and all. If the old deed says "beginning at an iron pin on the north bank of the creek, thence south 42 degrees east," that language rides along into your ownership.
This is why we can't just start from a survey or an address. Addresses change. Parcel numbers get reassigned. The legal description in the recorded chain is the constant, and it's the thing an Indiana deed actually conveys. When people ask why we need the old paperwork before we draft the new, that's the honest answer: we're not inventing a description, we're carrying the correct one forward and making sure nothing gets scrambled on the way.
Out here that matters more than in a platted subdivision. A lot in a Nashville neighborhood might read "Lot 14, Whispering Pines, as recorded in Plat Book 3." Clean and short. But wooded acreage near Brown County State Park often carries a long metes-and-bounds description written decades ago, referencing a fence line, a creek bed, or a stake that a surveyor drove in years back. Copy one bearing wrong and the deed you record doesn't match the land you bought. So we start from the source.
The document we need is the last recorded deed... the instrument the seller signed when they took title. It carries a recording stamp from the Brown County Recorder, a book and page number or an instrument number, and the full legal description. That's the piece we build from.
A few things people hand us that feel like they should work, but don't stand in for it:
If you have the recorded deed in a drawer or a scanned PDF from your last closing, that's the golden ticket. If you don't, don't lose sleep over it. Most sellers don't keep a crisp copy on hand, and that's completely normal.
Here's the part that takes the pressure off. You usually don't have to produce anything. When we run the title search, pulling the recorded chain from the Recorder's office is the whole job. We locate the prior deed, read its legal description, and confirm the seller is conveying exactly what they own.
That search is also where we catch the things that make Brown County property its own animal. An old easement letting a neighbor cross to reach the back forty. A well shared under an agreement written in the 1970s. A description that references the creek as it ran before it shifted. None of these are problems, they're just history, and they live in the recorded documents. We'd rather find them now, on paper, than have them surface after you've signed.
So when we ask early whether you have the prior deed, we're not putting the work on you. We're saving a day. If you happen to have it, we start drafting sooner. If you don't, we pull it ourselves and keep moving. Either way, the deed we prepare gets built on the real recorded description, not a guess.
The single most helpful thing you can hand us at the start isn't the deed itself. It's the parcel number, sometimes called the state parcel ID or the tax key. It's printed on the property tax statement, and it's the fastest thread for us to pull to find the recorded chain in Brown County's records. Give us that, plus the seller's name as it appears on title, and we can locate the prior deed and start confirming the description right away.
If you're buying from Indianapolis or Cincinnati and this is your first Indiana closing, you can read the state's plain overview of how Indiana records real estate documents through the county recorder to see how the chain gets kept. But you don't need to become an expert. That's what you hired us for.
The deed is the thing that makes your ownership official once we record it back with the Brown County Recorder. Getting it right starts with reading the right piece of paper first. Send us the parcel number when you're ready, and we'll take it from there.